Telstra boss Vicki Brady has apologised for the company’s mass outage on Wednesday, and says she has spoken to the Communications Minister Anika Wells and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“We have let our customers and Australians down, and for that, I am deeply sorry,” Brady told a press conference in Sydney on Friday.
“We take trust in Triple Zero extremely seriously, and it’s our responsibility to do everything in our power to make sure calls are answered and transferred immediately.”
Brady addressed this week’s network outages for the first time after ending her leave early and flying back to Australia. She wasn’t aware of the outage for several hours after it happened.
The first signs of the outage emerged about 3am, before Telstra realised there was an outage at around 4.30am. But Brady, who was overseas, says she wasn’t told until about 7am, which was in the evening where Brady was.
“I first became aware when I saw a missed message on Teams, and a voicemail was left for me by a head of our operations team. I immediately called him back on Teams, so we spoke within minutes,” Brady said.
“I was contacted when it hit a certain threshold, and it was right around that time that we also then notified key stakeholders like the minister’s office and all of those key requirements.”
She also defended the company’s handling of the outage, saying it followed planned protocols.
“We do have very clear processes around how we manage incidents, and they do escalate through different levels,” she said.
“And this did propagate, and once it hit the right thresholds, all of the right parties were notified.”
It comes as police are investigating a death potentially linked to the catastrophic outages that blocked more than 600 Triple Zero calls. This masthead first revealed the outages were caused by a glitch that reset crucial timing systems to November 2006, causing parts of the network to reject customers’ phones showing the correct time.
Communications Minister Anika Wells rounded on Telstra, demanding “total transparency” over the outages after the company took hours to inform her office that it had begun.
Telstra has kicked off an internal analysis of the outages while the communications regulator, ACMA, has already commenced its own probe on behalf of the government. Telstra was fined more than $3 million in 2024 over an earlier outage that stopped some customers reaching Triple Zero. The telco is now facing potential penalties in the tens of millions of dollars.
The outages left hundreds of people unable to contact Triple Zero, knocked out train services across Victoria and New South Wales and crippled payments systems nationally.
More to come.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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